The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to transmitting multimedia data over a camera interface, and more particularly, to a data processing system which transmits compressed multimedia data over a camera interface.
A camera interface is disposed between a first chip and a second chip to transmit multimedia data from the first chip to the second chip for further processing. For example, the first chip may include a camera module, and the second chip may include an image signal processor (ISP). The multimedia data may include image data (i.e., a single captured image) or video data (i.e., a video sequence composed of a plurality of captured images). In handheld systems, the camera transmission protocol may be standardized so as to enable interoperability. Capturing and transmitting the multimedia data directly to the image signal processor via the pre-defined protocol is inefficient due to the limited transmission bandwidth and large data amount. For example, an 8-M sensor (i.e., a sensor having 8-Mega pixels, that is, 3264×2448 pixels) with 30 fps (frames per second) and 10-bit pixel depth requires around 2.4G bps over one data lane transmission. This high data transmission rate impacts power consumption and electromagnetic interference (EMI) of the transmission interface as well as the design yield in the mass production stage. Moreover, the demands of high-resolution cameras such as 20M cameras are increasing. Hence, the multimedia data directly transmitted over the transmission interface between the camera module and the ISP would have a larger data size/data rate, which increases the power consumption of the camera interface inevitably. If the camera module and the ISP are both located at a handheld device (e.g., a smartphone) powered by a battery device, the battery life is shortened due to the increased power consumption of the transmission interface. Thus, there is a need for an innovative design which can effectively reduce the power consumption of the transmission interface between the camera module and the ISP.